Maartje Boer

CHAPTER 4 104 upward social comparisons and decrease their mental wellbeing (Kelly et al., 2018; Pera, 2018). In addition, theymay fall behindwith their schoolwork due to their intensive SMU, which could induce lower school wellbeing (Al-Menayes, 2015b; Salmela-Aro et al., 2017). Moreover, intense users may spend less offline time with friends or family because of their intensive SMU, which may have a negative impact on their social wellbeing (Underwood & Ehrenreich, 2017; Wallsten, 2013). However, there are also reasons why intense SMU may not be, or only be weakly associated with low wellbeing. Intense SMU may be a common behavior among adolescents (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Vannucci & McCauley Ohannessian, 2019), as social media often play an important role in their everyday social lives (Boyd, 2014). Furthermore, although intense SMU indicates adolescents’ time spent on SMU, it does not indicate their ability to control their SMU. Consequently, detrimental consequences of intense SMU may be limited. In contrast, problematic users typically feel bad when SMU is restricted (Griffiths et al., 2014), which conceivably harms their mental wellbeing. Also, the loss of control over and preoccupation with social media may impair their ability to regulate schoolwork responsibilities (Salmela-Aro et al., 2017) and may diminish their interest in offline social activities with others (Andreassen, 2015). As a result, problematic users may displace schoolwork and offline quality time with friends and family with SMU, which could affect their school and social wellbeing negatively. It, therefore, seems plausible that addiction- like problematic SMU interferes more strongly with wellbeing than intense SMU, yet this suggestion has rarely been investigated. The few studies that have examined adolescents’ intense and problematic SMU simultaneously showed that problematic SMU, but not intense SMU, was associated with lower mental wellbeing (Boer, Stevens, et al., 2020; Shensa et al., 2017; Van den Eijnden et al., 2018). Thus, previously found negative relationships between SMU intensity and wellbeing may have resulted from a confounding effect of problematic SMU. Furthermore, the associations of intense and problematic SMU with wellbeing may depend on the national context. Normalization theory, which mainly has been used to explain differences in substance use between varying contexts (Haskuka et al., 2018; Sznitman et al., 2015), suggests that once risk behaviors are socially and culturally accepted by the majority of the population and have become an unremarkable feature of life (Pennay &